347 réponses à ce sujet

[_six]

That's interesting. I first started Wild Woods with a dark sort of atmosphere in mind (as evidenced by the initial video I posted after I made the first 2 tiles), which I had in mind more of a magical, beast-infested wood. That was for a place in my gameworld called Thornber which was meant to be a magical beast-infested wood, would you believe... Since then I've been using it for brightly lit areas too, including pretty much an entire region called the Shivering Weald, and a pretty little foresters' village named Pollard's Hollow. With careful use of the meadow terrain, fence placeables and placement of streams/roads you can get a pretty smooth transition. Heck, most of my areas I built before I'd even implemented raise/lower.

Not to toot my own trumpet or anything  It's just that after the horrible mess of a tileset that is Wildlands, when I come to building properly with Wild Woods, even I'm surprised at how easy it is to create a really wide array of areas. I reckon its got a lot to do with creating all the art myself - it's way easier to stitch terrains together when I know them to the last vert.

</verbose philosophizing>

Damn it, I want to work on Wild Woods now. So many projects, so little time.

Modifié par _six, 09 août 2011 - 09:37 .

[henesua]

Why do you call Wildlands a horrible mess? I really like that tileset. There's no other tileset with that kind of feel for the rolling hills and the city tiles in it alone are amazing. You could have built a separate city tileset in that style and it would've been a big hit.

Modifié par henesua, 09 août 2011 - 01:24 .

[_six]

Actually that's pretty much it. A lot of what the tileset does is split into separate sections that'd have been better served by splitting into dedicated sets. Hence the more focused approach of Wild Woods later on. My lack of experience with planning a project of that size (and lack of any idea of just how big it'd grow) also meant I structured it pretty sloppily. Very few terrains can be combined successfully without a gap in between, and some of the terrain designs (like the Sea) are somewhat lacking IMO.

None of it's deal breaking - if you like the tileset, then great. Certainly the city dockside and the church terrain I'm pretty proud of, as well as the overall feel of the moors with the Winter textures especially. It's just that overall the level of 'professionalism' (for want of a better word) in Wildlands is much lower than that of Wild Woods.

Mind you, if I ever get up to chapter 3 of my module, it'll need a city which I plan to build from the Winter Wildlands set. And chances are I'll have to dig up my unfinished docks tiles, with stairs and quayside boardwalks, etc

Modifié par _six, 09 août 2011 - 02:34 .

[henesua]

I agree that one of Wildwoods' strengths is that it does not try to do everything. It just focuses on being a forest and does it well. This keeps the download small, and makes the set easy to work with. Still, I find Wildlands more beautiful. The texture work of the basic terrain is gorgeous. I get the sense that you enjoyed working on it, and kept adding different parts as a labour of love. This may not be true, but it feels that way. It looks like a particularly well loved creation.

[Rolo Kipp]

<fidgets uncomfortably...>

_six wrote...

Personally I'd reccomend Friedeyes' summer only version of Seasonal Forest instead of Worms' if you want to use that, though. The size of the combined SF tileset makes building hellishly slow, not to mention loading ingame. Pathfinding can also be laggy in both, on account of the walkmeshes being pretty badly made - a natural by product of Worms having to make so many tiles in a relatively short time for the set.

Unfortunately, what I'm trying to do is to set up 36 alternates for each of 8 areas that are "active" for the PC. 8 states (blasted heath to climax forest) x 4 seasons.

To the PC, when he crosses the transition from the central area, he is always going to the same area (West Hearthwood, for instance), but the area seems dynamic, responding to both the state of the forests health and the season.  I am also considering a round-robin of 4 mods for the seasonal variation, though I think that would be very kludgy. 

The point, though, is that having seasonal variations with the trees & features in the same places makes immersion deeper, IMHO. Always being able to count on "turning left at the old stump and 50 paces past the willow...", whether clad in flowers or snow.

So I'll take malleability over beauty...
Except I get an exception if I try to adjust tile properties in SF and that makes me nervous... :-P
And the laggy pathfinding (not an issue for me yet, as I'm still setting up the geometry. Haven't started populating anything yet) is also a big downer :-(
Probably a deal breaker...

Both have their advantages. SF has far more options and terrains, whilst the options in Wild Woods generally work together much better. SF has a much wider colour pallette, whilst Wild Woods is a tiny fraction of the file size. SF has loads of content ripped from NWN2, whilst Wild Woods content is all my own original work - which limits its scope considerably.

I only need the broader scope in that my concept is such a tiny target :-P

I honestly and absolutely love the look of the Wildwoods. I think it works well lit and dark. And, yes, I like the smaller file size.

But I *really, really* want seasonal variations that are consitent between both seasons and states... like having that one grand old tree that hangs on even through the farmers logging until finally, in the blasted heath, you find its charred & hacked carcus lying on the ground...
...and I really like the hermit's treehouse as PC HQ...

Another option I've been thinking about involves primarily meadow tiles and creating seasonal variations with placeables. This would also allow for the vegetation to be manipulated by PCs... but then I have a great many active resources...

And making them static kind of brings me back to a tileset  approach.

OTOH, Placeables let me "grow" the trees...

Why not just use both? Considering the comparatives file sizes, adding Wild Woods is a no brainer IMO if you wanted to use both - its not like you've got two huge downloads for players.

Consistency of syle between the main play areas, primarily. 

I do intend to use Wildwoods for certain sub-areas (The Hart of the Wold, Druid's grove), regardless of the monster I use for the other 289 areas. The look and feel is just perfect.

<...still straddling the fence>

[_six]

Well, I'm not about to try and dissuade you from using SF.

Thought I might add that I actually have a set of winter textures for Wild Woods lying around. If you're doing this in multiplayer, you could add this as a hak only during the seasons you want it to be winter, and leave it out (but still ask for it as a download) at other times.

That's actually a lot less work than making every area several times and trying to maintain consistency between them IMO. In fact, senemenelas has a system somewhere on the vault for doing the same thing with SF areas - so you only have to create one of each area.

[henesua]

Thats a cool idea, six (swapping textures so that you only have to build an area once). But I don't think it works in a single player NWN module because I am unaware of the ability to turn HAKs on or off via scripting. You'd basically ahve to change the module properties across resets yes? OR maybe NWNX will let you do this without reloading the module... dunno. Curious to find out though.

Modifié par henesua, 11 août 2011 - 12:28 .

[MazzoniM]

@Henesua - The summer and winter tilesets have textures with identical names, so the top-most hak would override the lower hak. Changing the 'season' of areas made with these haks is as easy as re-arranging the hak order.

[henesua]

I am talking about doing this while the module is running. As far as I know, you can not rearrange the hak order while a mod is running.

[Rolo Kipp]

<fiddling abouot with tile settings...*Every* tile setting...>

_six wrote...

Well, I'm not about to try and dissuade you from using SF..

Understood :-) But if the pathing issues and the lag (once I have all the *other* junk happening) comes up, I will re-evaluate.  Actually, I'm still exploring the Vault and constantly evaluating =)

Thought I might add that I actually have a set of winter textures for Wild Woods lying around. If you're doing this in multiplayer, you could add this as a hak only during the seasons you want it to be winter, and leave it out (but still ask for it as a download) at other times..

That's a very cool idea! =)

That's actually a lot less work than making every area several times and trying to maintain consistency between them IMO. In fact, senemenelas has a system somewhere on the vault for doing the same thing with SF areas - so you only have to create one of each area.

Means going back to my round-robin idea of seasonal modules, storing henchman/gamestate in the db...

That way I can keep my tags identical, er, reduce my tags by x4 or so. Reduces module size as well...

Do you have those winter textures anywhere handy? =)

<... while time burns around him>

[Rolo Kipp]

<shuffling the deck...>

henesua wrote...

I am talking about doing this while the module is running. As far as I know, you can not rearrange the hak order while a mod is running.

Ah! But if I make separate seasonal modules, then I rearrange the hak order for the different seasons and simply (Hah!) store the henchman/game state in the NwN db (Looking hard @ MBHK :-) And the improved battle ai... and...), Jump to new module, retrieve state and go. Right?

<...and sometimes dealing from a not-so-full deck>

[Builder_Anthony]

I dont see why it wouldnt Your just transfering stuff over and the player would still have the same charater.But im not 100 percent sure.

[Calvinthesneak]

_six wrote...

Calvinthesneak wrote...

It's not too hard to add a hak to the list and create an altered doortypes.2da (and possibly genericdoors.2da)

In fact in this case, this hak doesn't use either doors 2da, and is pretty much guanteed to be compatible with everything else with no modifications needed unless someone deliberately named a tileset ttw01 just to spite me Lets keep this topic related to the tileset itself, though.

Jenna WSI wrote...

You sure know how to break a girl's heart.

If I had a coin for every time I'd heard that... I'd have a coin.

Question for you Six.  Maybe someone else can answer for me....  Added the tileset just fine, but when I am using the set, and place a "Mine Entrance" in the cliffside group, when I pull up the properties for the door, I get a message about selected model doesn't exist, please choose another.  It's lying since the model is plainly visible, and the door works fine in a test.  Is it a problem with my genericdoors.2da or doortypes.2da, or the .set file that I'm getting such an error?

[Builder_Anthony]

I have seen that error as well its the big double doors.

[_six]

No idea, most custom tilesets I've seen have this 'error' too. It may be that a dupe entry in doortypes.2da would make it go away but since it does no harm other than bring up an error message (it goes back to being fine once you've hit OK, and doesn't cause any actual issues) I'm not inclined to add a doortypes.2da and reduce compatibility just to fix an error that doesn't exist per se.

[Calvinthesneak]

Yep, no worries Six. I was just curious what caused it and if there was an easy fix. Doesn't seem to cause any issues so I won't worry about it.

[Vivienne L]

Has anybody made any prefabs with these tilesets?

[_six]

The wheels begin to turn once more.

[Hekatoncheires]

coniferous forest?

[henesua]

Too much good news in one day is gonna overwhelm me.

So ... this is an idea I've been thinking about, but am not sure how practical it would be and thought I'd run it by you since you mention that you have winter versions of the wild woods textures lying around.

Is it feasible to create a seasonal change in a tileset via tilemagic? For example if you made winter and summer tiles that looked identical in all ways except for the seasonal aspect, could you set up your tileset to only be summer by default, but then put all the winter tiles in a VFX file and then dynamically change seasons for an area? Would this give you the best of both worlds by keeping the tileset "small" in terms of load times etc... BUT also enable dynamic seasonality?

Just a crazy idea I had about tile magic. Not sure if it is feasible. And not suggesting you do this. But I am interested in hearing your opinion on it. I'm not a tilemagic expert and I don't know exactly how swapping one tile with another works.

[_six]

Tile magic involves putting a tile model name into a 2da and spawning it in as a visual effect via nwscript. It doesn't replace the tile, only places on top of it. It's also quite limited in terms of what you can achieve (eg no envmap work).

A workable way to use it might be to create the entire tileset as walkmesh only, using clever scripting to spawn in the specific tile models you want as vfx. Or you could do the same thing with placeables. However, non-static placeables disappear a certain distance from the player, and they'd need to be non-static for that kind of purpose. Not sure if vfx have a max draw distance or not.

Either way you would not be able to see the area in toolset and it'd take a long time to set up, having to use waypoints to create effectively an array of individual tile names and locations. Possibly laggy as hell too, the engine uses a different render path for static tiles and placeables to dynamic objects.


Edit:

One method I think is not a bad one, is to provide a set of accompanying seasonal texture overrides as part of the main download. You can then swap them on and off on server side and be assured players will have the content. I might actually look into doing this. Going to have to redo the textures though as recent developments have made Wild Woods take a turn for the (IMO) slightly prettier.

Modifié par _six, 06 juillet 2012 - 04:18 .

[KlatchainCoffee]

Wow, that's great news!

A coniferous or even 'jungle' set of tiles would be amazing as well as any seasonal variation, but for something a little less labour-intensive (from someone who's built stuff with existing version) -

- walkable canyon floors
- de-shrubbered forest floor rotation tile.
- an extra 'water tile type' (a bit like the bioware forest has).

Something that simulates actual 'tree-climbing' would be amazing too (I'm thinking of something simple, like sticking _small_ bits of walkable mesh high up above the ground (similar to the tiny but usable crow's nest on the carrack ship feature) that would not interfere much with the ground-level walkmesh and could be accessed via triggers and transitions. Makes me think of the way Bilbo had to climb to the top to get their bearings in Mirkwood in the Hobbit.

[Rolo Kipp]

<fidgeting...>

_six wrote...
...
One method I think is not a bad one, is to provide a set of accompanying seasonal texture overrides as part of the main download. You can then swap them on and off on server side and be assured players will have the content. I might actually look into doing this. Going to have to redo the textures though as recent developments have made Wild Woods take a turn for the (IMO) slightly prettier.

How would you do the swap server-side? I'm *quite* interested.

I'm really hoping something will come out of Virusman's texture replacement functions. Then all you'd need is to swap the texture as the season changes. You could even stagger the change to both reduce load and to provide a more natural progression of the seasons. Have snow melt to bracken, flowers bloom in bracken, bracken green to grass, etc.

<...as the wheel turns>

[gutwrench66kg]

Rolo: It would be as easy as putting the textures into different files, and simply rotating the load order...

Using made up names for files, if your load order was

autumn.hak
spring.hak
summer.hak
winter.hak
~wildwoods.hak

one could re-order them and put the winter.hak file to the top in the builders module, and the areas built with Autumn textures will re-texture to winter.

[s e n]

Six, you really have to do that. in my experience i had only ++++ and not a single - from doing it.
Consider also the possibility to override not only textures, but also entire tiles: an ice terrain that shows only in winter, for example. imagine an unreachable island in the middle of a lake that suddenly becomes connected to the land just cuz of ice and this is just 1 idea!
also placeables can be made seasonable of course, flowers that show up in spring, fruits over the trees, corn, snow mounds, etc etc etc etc
also, i havent been reported of a single issue server side for the entire life of cormanthor pw, so yes, thats safe and clean